3 Ways a Help Desk Improves the Customer Experience

In the digital world, help desks have become ubiquitous. Businesses of all shapes and sizes use them to communicate with customers and resolve tickets that come in at all hours of the day.  

However, for retailers with customer service desks in their brick-and-mortar stores and small eCommerce brands that interact with customers one-on-one, help desks may seem unnecessary and even detrimental to the customer experience.  

Believe it or not, there are several advantages of help desk software, though. In this post, we’ll explain what a help desk is and share a few reasons why they’re valuable assets to your customer care efforts. 

What is a Help Desk? 

A help desk is a tool that collects, organizes, and manages customer issues.  

Using a help desk, customers can send messages to customer support teams about problems and questions they’re dealing with. And once those inquiries reach the dashboard, the customer care representatives can route them to the agent best able to help, share solutions, and close inquiries once they’ve been resolved.  

But how exactly do help desks improve customer service? Let’s look at three ways.  

1. Guarantees Customers Don’t Slip Through the Cracks 

When you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of customers on a daily basis, it’s easy to lose track of a few. In some cases, it may simply be a case of forgetting to respond. In others, you may forget to route or resolve a ticket altogether.  

Help desk solutions eliminate that risk by creating an ongoing queue of customer tickets to resolve with all the relevant information included.  

Using a digital customer service desk, you can also sign off on issues as you resolve them and log details regarding the resolution for future reference. This makes a huge difference to the customer experience, as you can keep up with the customer conversation (no matter where it left off) and provide new solutions to recurring problems.  

2. Streamlines Support Ticket Routing 

The last thing customers want to do is be put on hold while customer service agents attempt to route them to the right person. Not only is it a frustrating use of time, because they can’t put the phone down and do something else while they wait, but oftentimes, they also end up reaching an answering machine.  

By routing support tickets via help desks, you remove both types of friction from the experience. Your team can handle problems on the backend, without any extra effort from the customer, and shoppers never land in a voicemail box. All the information is saved to a ticket during the first interaction, and the details can be shared with anyone in your organization who might need them too.    

3. Enhances Your Omnichannel Experience 

To balance the desires of Baby Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Zers, you need to adopt an omnichannel customer support program. Traditional channels like phone calls and email now need to be supplemented with new customer experience trends like live messaging, chatbots, social media, visual IVR, video chat, and knowledge centers.  

Keeping track of all of these communication channels can be challenging, though – especially since customers expect a near real-time response.  

Help desks, specifically omnichannel help desks, solve that issue by allowing you to manage and respond to all types of support requests from a single space. This means you can troubleshoot issues faster and keep in touch with your customers more easily.   

So, exactly how can the service desk deliver high-quality customer service? Simple. It streamlines ticket resolution, ensures no customers are forgotten, and enables you to offer an exceptional customer experience. And that means happier shoppers at every stage of the customer journey.